In a silver halide photographic light-sensitive material (hereinafter simply referred as light-sensitive material), particularly in a light-sensitive material for graphic arts or that for X-ray photography, various kinds of plastic films are used as a transparency support constituting the light-sensitive material. Among them a polyester film has been usually used, which is excellent in mechanical properties thereof. Polyethylene terephthalate film is most usually used as the support by the reason of that the PET film has a high dimension stability and high elongation strength.
The light-sensitive material for graphic arts or X-ray photography are photographically processed, after exposed by light, by an automatic processor having four processing steps, i.e., developing, fixing, washing and drying. In the case of processing by such processor, the developer and fixer are usually replenished according to the processed area of light-sensitive material. It has been usual that the replenishing amounts of developer and fixer have been each 350 ml or more per square meter of light-sensitive material.
On the other hand, exhaust liquids of processing solutions cannot be discharged into a public sewerage because they contain undesirable ingredients. The exhaust liquids are recovered and destroyed by fire with a high expense and many troubles. Therefore, it is strongly demanded to reduce the amounts of exhaust liquids of photographic processing solutions. As a means for solving this problem, it is considered to reduce the replenishing amounts for the solutions being in a automatic processor.
Further, in graphic arts light-sensitive materials, photographic technologies for obtaining a ultra high contrast in the photographic properties are applied.
Among them, a light-sensitive material containing a hydrazine compound such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,269,929 and a light-sensitive material containing a tetrazolium compound such as described in Japanese Patent Publication Open for Public Inspection (JP O.P.I.) No. 59-79244/1984 have been known. Recently, in the field of photomechanical processing, improvement in the dot quality has been required. For instance, it is necessary to reproduce a fine dot of 25 .mu.m or less in a high precision printing using a screen of 600 lines per inch or in a technique so called FM screening method using a screen having a random patter of uniform fine dots.
However, there is a problem that the drying property of a light-sensitive material after processing is considerably degraded when many sheets of a light-sensitive material having a polyester film support are continuously processed with a replenishing amount of not more than 330 ml per square meter of light-sensitive material for reducing the replenishing amounts of developer and fixer. It is preferable to reduce a water content in the hydrophilic colloid layer or the swelling rate of the layer for preventing the degradation in the drying property. For the above purpose, it is usually performed to reduce the amount of gelatin in the hydrophilic layer of the light-sensitive material or to increase the amount of hardener to be added to the hydrophilic colloid layer. However, when such countermeasures are applied to the light-sensitive material having a PET film support, some problems are occurred such as considerable changing in the sensitivity, increasing in fogging or changing in the gradation of the light-sensitive material. Accordingly, there is a limit on the improvement in the light-sensitive material using PET support. Further, dot quality and reproduce ability of dot images are degraded in such a method as in which fine dots of 25 .mu.m or less are reproduced in a graphic arts light-sensitive material using the PET film support.